1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to digital communication systems and, more particularly, to complexity reduction in the implementation of receiver equipment for such communication systems.
2. Description of the Prior Art
For the particular case of North American digital cellular communications, either of two information types can be transmitted. The receiver must determine the type, and this selection is not assisted by any external flagging information. The two data types, corresponding to compressed voice information (voice) and control information (FACCH) are encoded with different convolutional forward error correction codes. "FACCH" is the acronym for "Fast Associated Control Channel" from "Dual-Mode Mobile Station - Base Station Compatibility Standard", EIA/TIA Project Number 2215, Interim Standard 54, December 1989. One method of overcoming the ambiguity as to which type of data was transmitted is to separately decode received information under both hypotheses and then determine the more consistent hypothesis by examining both sets of decoded data. This approach is wasteful of resources in that the results of one of the decoding processes are never used.